Beyond, Heavy Rain creator David Cage loves games with 'soul'
Since he's answered so many questions about Beyond: Two Souls, and since the PS3 game comes out next week, I decided the time was right to ask Quantic Dream CEO David Cage about some other games. Specifically, the ones he admires and that emotionally affect him.
"I love games where I can feel there is someone behind [it] ... whatever that means!" Cage said. "Sometimes you play [a game] and just feel like, 'Oh, this is just nice software developed by 200 people and it's nice, and the technology's great,' but there's no soul. And sometimes when you play a game you can feel the soul of someone behind it, and that's what I love. For me, Journey was something like this. For me, Papo & Yo was something like this. [In that game] there's really someone talking about these personal feelings that he experienced, and that's what I really love."
Cage added that he tries to put soul into the games he makes; he's both the director and writer of Beyond: Two Souls, as he was for Quantic Dream's previous PS3 game, Heavy Rain.
At a BAFTA lecture last month, Cage cited Journey, Papo & Yo, Rain, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Gone Home, and The Unfinished Swan as representative of an indie community compensating for a lack of resources with creativity, and he's clearly a proponent of indie games. I asked him if there were any major games in which he saw a similar auteur quality to what he admired in Journey and Papo & Yo.
"There are a couple," said Cage. "I think the games by Fumito Ueda. They are not indie games per se because they were produced by Sony, but there is definitely an auteur behind them, that's for sure. In Ico and Shadow of the Colossus you can feel there is someone with a soul behind them."
